How long can we keep 301, 410 redirects?

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Hi,

We have a large number of 301, 410 redirects. I would like to know how long we can keep these redirects? Is there any time limit that I can keep until? How do you perform managing/cleaning of redirects in your website?

Any help, guys?


Thanks a lot!
#search engine optimization #301 #410 #long #redirects
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  • A 301 redirect is used to indicate that the location of a document has permanently moved to a new location - IE it has a different URL which is permanent. Therefore it should be left in place forever. Over time search engines will only refer to the new URL (when they work correctly - but that's another story) so you might be tempted to remove the 301 redirect - don't do it because other sites which have linked to you with the old URL may not (usually won't) become aware of the new document location and will continue linking to the old URL.

    There is no limit to the amount of time you can keep a 301 redirect - that's what 'permanent' means. Disk space is cheap - why would you delete a 301?

    Returning a 410 status is a different kettle of fish entirely. This is not intended for redirecting, and should never be used for that purpose. A 410 says "This document is permanently removed - it will never come back - it doesn't exist anywhere else."
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    • [2] replies
    • @jxam69 Thank you so much the insightful answering!
      But my concern is that, whatever redirect it is, it's going to increase the page load time for a user. So we thought of cleaning all that 301 redirects in a periodic basis.
      I will make sure that, I am not going to remove any URLs which has been linked from various external resources.

      So if I want to go ahead with the current project, how long should I wait before removing a redirect? Should I wait till the new URL getting crawled? Should I update the sitemap so that the old URL is not crawled?

      Can you help me from Search Engine point of view?

      Thanks,
      • [1] reply
    • thank you so much as i also need an answer to this question
  • A note on 410 response codes: I had a site with over 40k broken links as a result of identifying and removing a whole lot of infinite pages. These were returning 404s and going no where, I since changed the response code to 410 Gone and has dropped this down to ~1.5k in webmaster tools.

    You mileage may vary, but if you have a whole stack of pages you can't get rid of from webmaster tools, try a 410 instead.
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    How long can we keep 301, 410 redirects?

    Hi, We have a large number of 301, 410 redirects. I would like to know how long we can keep these redirects? Is there any time limit that I can keep until? How do you perform managing/cleaning of redirects in your website?